Tag Archives: photos

Visiting Calgary, Canada

So we left Edmonton by bus and pretty much “goofed around all day” after we got to Calgary.

Waiting for the bus to Calgary
Our group waiting for the bus to Calgary

Calgary Canada

Calgary bus ride
These are on the ride from Edmunton to Calgary.

The last two photos seems a little high for a bus but downtown seems a little empty if they are from the hotel window…

In Calfary, we stayed at another Sheraton.

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If my memory serves me right, my room was number 308…

We got to Calgary in time for lunch and had lots of time for goofing around (as stated above) but I’m not sure what we did. I know I really liked the big cities and I’d never been let loose in downtown Detroit so I probably wandered around everywhere and anywhere I could.

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Before this trip all I knew about Calgary and the Calgary Stampede (which I think we missed by less than a week) could have been summed up in this story in the Uncanny X-men.

If you read X-men you are surely nodding your head in agreement. If you didn’t read X-men you scratching your head in confusion. I was HUGE into X-men at the time and I’ll always connect Calgary with this X-men/Alpha Flight crossover (Alpha Flight was the Canadian super-hero team that Wolverine was from).

Calgary Tower
Calgary Tower

From my journal:

8:00 pm – Went to dinner at the four seasons and then went up the Calgary Tower. Great view, took lots of pictures. Rough town, almost saw a fight a couple of times.

And here is a few of the photos from up high a little reflection from the windows but it’s bearable.

View from Calgary Tower

View from Calgary Tower

View from Calgary Tower
Views from the Calgary Tower.

The Calgary Stampede
I believe this is where they held the Calgary Stampede.

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$1 commemorative coin for the Calgary Stampede.

While I was on this trip Canada was issuing a variety of $1 coins for certain events and locations. This one has Guy Weadick on it, not sure if they had multiple different ones for the Stampede for that year or just one person a year. For some reason these coinds felt more like collectables than our current 50 state quarters currently do. I though I’d gotten quite few on the trip but I can only find two…

If you’re reading this post out of context, this is me re-journaling a trip to Alaska from when I was a kid. You might want to click the “trip to Alaska” link and go to the bottom and read them in order. I’m posting each entry on the same day that it happened years ago.

Four hours in Winnipeg, Canada

We had a four hour break from the train in Winnipeg (the capitol of Manitobe) and listed as “where the prairies begin” (that’s from my trip notes). I wrote:

We stopped in Winnipeg (still taking train). A big city, but not much interesting and we took a tour by bus.

I know I talked a lot as a kid, but I guess I didn’t write a lot!

VIA Train passenger
This was one of the people on our trip, I remember them but don’t ask me their name.

Speaking of the people on the trip: There were ten boys about my age and if I recall correctly most seemed to be spoiled kids where were probably sent away to get rid of them for the summer. There were about 40 adults and I think they were mostly (but not all) retirees. The adults seemed kind of well traveled about two-thirds were married and traveling together. I didn’t realize this at the time but all of the adults traveling alone were women, some were marked “Ms.” and some “Mrs.”, not sure if the latter were windowed or they left the men at home.

Bear sub statue
I’m sure I thought this statue was cute then, since I still do now!

The sculpture of the cubs looks to be something of Leo Mol and may now be located in the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden which opened after I took this photo. It looks a lot like Bear Cubs (1976) or Playful Cubs (1975); those two are so similar it may be one of them or another similar one (thanks to Nancy for pointing this out in the comments).

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Saint Boniface Cathedral is a link to Wikipedia, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Thanks to Nancy for identification of this too and a link to Wikipedia.

I guess my high point of the day was when I was playing Bingo and “won a VIA key chain bottle opener”. I do remember winning something playing Bingo, but I don’t remember the keychain at all and it’s not in my box of souvenirs.

If anyone can identify the items in these photos better, please do! Especially if you know I’ve got them labeled in the wrong city!

If you’re reading this post out of context, this is me re-journaling a trip to Alaska from when I was a kid. You might want to click the “trip to Alaska” link and go to the bottom and read them in order. I’m posting each entry on the same day that it happened years ago.

Alaska: A long long time ago… but still June 28th

So when I was a kid, I had the opportunity to go on a trip through Canada and on to Alaska and (sort of) back through the US. This was a big deal in my house, I didn’t get sent away to camp for the summer (maybe a week with scouts) or even on my own for any trips, this was huge for me. My Mom knew I was interested in Alaska from books (all I can think of off hand is The Hardy Boys – The Mystery at Devil’s Paw), television and school, she saw a newspaper article about this local teacher who did a tour every summer with seniors and teenage boys. I grew up with my single Mom who worked her butt off at a local grocery store and while this trip was a decent price, I still understood it was a lot of money; plus, I had to earn and pay for a third of it (or a quarter?). But the trip looked amazing, it was clearly one of those once in a lifetime opportunities and was probably supposed to build character helping the seniors with their luggage and other things.

This is that story of that trip. I’ve got photos (actually, mostly slides that were recently scanned) some (sometimes poorly written) journal entries by a 15-year old me and some other odds and ends that I’ll include. I might make a mistake or two with photos in the wrong order and me having to make some of my best guesses (but I’m pretty sure I’d kept the photos in order). Keep in mind that I don’t have as many photos as the cRaZy number that I would take these days since they wren’t digital back then.

The trip started on June 28 at empty parking lot in Pleasant Ridge where we all met and got on the bus to Windsor, Canada where we would catch the train to Toronto, Canada. My experience on busses were probably limited to school trips (maybe something with the boy scouts?) and I probably hadn’t ever been on a train at this point in my life.

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A picture out of the window of the train.
(I’m guessing that’s Toronto in the distance?)

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Some tall building I must have thought was cool since I took several pictures (none were very good).

We had a few hours to kill in Toronto while waiting for the train. So we wandered around and saw a few things and spent some time at an amusement park called Canada Place, the weird thing is that I don’t really remember Canada Place from any of my trips to Toronto the following few years and it looks like it’s still around.

CN Tower
Toronto’s CN tower which I really thought we went up in it, but since I don’t have any pictures, maybe we didn’t.

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This ship was docked nearby (at the carnival?)

I promise the adventures get more exciting after the first few days since they are mostly transportation to get to other places and I didn’t do much with my journal the first 5 days…

Biking on Hines Drive today

So it’s Saturday and I was biking Hines Drive (again). It was extra windy so it was ext a difficult biking, but I’d got the 25-mile Tour de Troit next week so I thought maybe I should do the whole 15-miles today.

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It was extra green today, so that was nice, summer has been so dry, the grass has looked like straw and I’ve been waiting for tumbleweeds to roll out in front of me.

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I did get to see a dear running (galloping?), I had seen it a few minutes before and waited for it to come out the woods, but it didn’t so I started biking and it caught up to me again. I didn’t even stop to take this one, it’d have gotten away if I had!

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I saw this guy go zooming by on his Lightning F40. He was flying (I didn’t stop to take this one either) I saw him pass the bikers in the distance and look how far away they are still! He was flying!

Silhouette Photography

One of the photo groups went out to a park at sunset to do some silhouettes. I’d never done this before so I made sure to attend.

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There were twenty of us, so we were always asking the two models to move. We pretty much needed them between us and the sun.

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A few of these I cropped and a few I tweaked a tiny bit in iPhone on the iPad. When I say tiny bit, I mean one click and a drag (not a dozen adjustments).

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I cropped a few too. When the contrast was just right there was too much black below the figures.

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If I’d gotten a little lower on this one, I think she’d really look like she was floating.

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I was surprised at how much red you could still see in the ribbon in this shot.

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The bicycle was tricky because she needed to go slow and also not accidentally ride down the hill she was atop of.

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This one I think I cropped too much, but maybe I was cropping something out. Regardless, she’s too much of the image but I love this one, I need to find the original and take another look at it.

I took hundreds of bad ones. Why? Because they kept moving. We didn’t have control over them moving, so we just kept snapping. But I got lots of good ones too!!!

It’s International Backup Day!

It’s World Backup Day! It’s not that you should only backup once a year, it’s an awareness day. So I guess it should be called “Backup Awareness Day”. But seriously, you should backup your important documents and photos all the time. Why? Because you’ll be very sad / upset / angry when you lose those files. Please notice, I said “when”, not “if”. Moving your photos to a different device (and deleting off the computer) is not a backup, it’s the only copy. Multiple copies is alwaysrecommended!!!

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If it’s an important document, save multiple copies. If it’s your resume (CV), save it as “Resume March 2012” so that you’ve got previous versions of the file if something happens. If you’ve made massive changes to that document, just e-mail a copy to yourself; the copy in your mail account is an off site backup. When I do new technology plans (100 page documents) I save new versions every few hours, I don’t want to think I moved those 10 pages from section 7 to section 5 and realize later I never pasted them, I can go back and get an earlier version of those pages later.

If it’s photos, don’t wait until your camera is full, that’s the only copy of those photos, if you lose the camera, it gets stolen, or something else weird happens, you lose all those photos!!! Even uploading them to a site like Walgreens, Costco, Kodak or wherever you might send your photos is a backup (it’ll cost to get your photos out, but at least they aren’t lost); these places don’t guarantee that they’ll keep your photos but they do want you to share them and print more copie$ of them, just be sure you’re uploading the largest possible size photos. Facebook is not good for this, they do not keep high quality versions of the photos, they will not be good for printing later.

Every so often back your documents and photos up to multiple DVD (standard DVD’s hold more than 4 GB) and make multiple copies; once you’ve got them sorted making five copies isn’t much harder than making one copy. Keep a copy at your Mom’s house or at your kids house or in your safe deposit box. You don’t want all the copies at the same place in case there is a fire and they all burn down. Then you can delete these photos from the cloud and you’ve got more space for more photos.

The last few versions of the Macintosh OS will back up to an external drive via Time Capsule and you can go back in time and look at what version was on the computer at a particular time (it’s very cool and easy).

There are off site services you can use (I use Dropbox).

Syncing your photo to your computer generally backs up the phone numbers, calendar, photos and more. The latest version of the iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch) will back up automatically daily to the iCloud if you wish; the problem with this is it’s an all or nothing option when you want to restore.

All photos that you take with your iPhone or iPad get automatically backed up to the iCloud. These then show up on your computer in the iPhoto Photo Stream. If you import from a camera to iPhoto, it automatically puts those photos in the Photo Stream and you can see them on all the devices you’ve synced with the iCloud (including your AppleTV). It only keeps the last 1,000 photos and doesn’t keep any videos, but it’s a partial backup. So this is an automatic download that I get have in the cloud too.

Backing up is especially important if your main computer is a portable device. You can earlier drop or have stolen your laptop or tablet, you need those files backed up!

The Fisher Building

I’ve got this huge painting of the Fisher Building. It’s got to be six feet high and it fits perfect in my condo. I get lots of compliments all the time on it. The first few years I had it, I hadn’t even realized it was the Fisher building.

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It’s up very high on the wall (the bottom is at least eight feet up?) so I couldn’t get a straight on shot. But this didn’t come out too bad for my iPhone with the flash in a very dim room!

I’m mentioning this today, because I made a panorama of the Fisher building while downtown.


I was a little too close, I’ll do one on a nicer day later and try to stand back a little farther for the whole effect.

Does anyone know if there is a restaurant or viewing platform up top?!?

November 1st, 2011

Two things for today: a photo thing and a numbers thing.

Today is 11/1/11 or if you live over seas it’s 1/11/11. I like fun number things, in 10 days we’ll have another date number thing.

And in a few days my car milage will be 123456! So hopefully I don’t miss it. (I should verify that)

Yes, it is the little things that I enjoy in life! button-26things-125.jpg

The photo thing is a 26 Things project / collection. Slightly different than usual, it’s really 13 things but two photographs of the same topic. For example, one of the topics is “patters” so you could do two different patterns, you could do two opposite patterns, you could do two different perspectives of the same pattern (or just take a dozen different pattern pictures and post your two favorite ones). I like this twist, I’ve started a few times and never finished, but I think I will with this one. And I’ll probably post throughout the month as I get each pair completed (I think?). Plus, it’s less items to remember! Then you post your completed set on-line somewhere (flickr, blog, etc) and link to it from the project site.